I have an interesting problem: How do I shoehorn "hired by The Internet for
a full year to work on Free Software" into my resume?

Yes, the git-annex Kickstarter
went well. :) I had asked for enough to get by for three months. Multiple
people thought I should instead work on it for a full year and really do
the idea justice. Jason Scott was especially
enthusiastic about this idea.
So I added new goals and eventually it got there.

I have a pretty good reach with this blog.
I reached my original goal in the first 24 hours, and during that
time, probably 75% of contributions were from people I know,
people who use git-annex already, or people who probably read this
blog. Oh, and these contributors were amazingly generous.

I had a small, realistic, easily acheivable goal. This ensured my project
was quickly visible in "successful projects" on Kickstarter, and stayed
visible. If I had asked for a year up front, I might not have fared as well.
It also led to my project being a "Staff Pick" for a week on Kickstarter,
which exposed it to a much wider audience. In the end, nearly half my
funding came from people who stumbled over the project on Kickstarter.

The git-annex assistant is an easy idea to grasp, at varying levels of
technical expertise. It can be explained by analogy to DropBox, or
as something on top of git, or as an approach to avoid to cloud vendor
lockin. Most of my previous work would be much harder to explain to a
broad audience in a Kickstarter. But this still appeals to very technical
audiences too. I hit a sweet spot here.

I'm enhancing software I've already written. This made my
Kickstarter a lot less vaporware than some other software projects on
Kickstarter. I even had a branch in git where I'd made sure I could pull
off the basic idea of tying git-annex and inotify together.

I put in a lot of time on the Kickstarter side. My 3 minute video,
amuaturish as it is, took 3 solid days work to put together. (And 14
thousand people watched it... eep!) I added new and better rewards,
posted fairly frequent updates, answered numerous questions, etc.

I managed to have at least some Kickstarter rewards that are connected to
the project is relevant ways. This is a hard part of Kickstarter for Free
Software; just giving backers a copy of the software is not an incentive
for most of them. A credits file mention pulled in a massive 50% of
all backers, but they were mostly causual backers.
On the other end, 30% of funds came from USB keychains, which
will be a high-quality reward and has a real use case with git-annex.

The surprising, but gratifying part of the rewards was that 30% of funds
came from rewards that were essentially "participate in this free
software project" -- ie, "help set my goals" and "beta tester". It's cool
to see people see real value in participating in Free Software.

I was flexible when users asked for more. I only hope I can
deliver on the Android port. Its gonna be a real challange.
I even eventually agreed to spend a month trying to port it to Windows.
(I refused to develop an IOS port even though it could have probably
increased my funding; Steve's controlling ghost and I don't get along.)

It seemed to help the slope of the graph when I started actually working
on the project, while the Kickstarter was still ongoing. I'd reached my
original goal, so why not?

I've already put two weeks work into developing the git-annex assistant.
I'm blogging about my progress every day on its
development blog.
The first new feature, a git annex watch command that automatically
commits changes to git, will be in the next release of git-annex.

I can already tell this is going to be a year of hard work, difficult
problems, and great results. Thank you for helping make it happen.

strictly speaking
Strictly speaking you are not working on Free Software. Your software is GPLed which is almost, but not quite free. Congratutlations: getting to work on open source software for a job is fun.
Comment by
Anon78YZa5En
— at lunch time on Tuesday, June 19th, 2012